Allison B. Cooke was born in Midwest City, Oklahoma. She spent most of her childhood living on the east coast before moving to Wisconsin in 1970. Allison holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Master of Fine Arts Degree in Drawing and Painting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In 2023, Allison, her fellow artist husband Bobby, and beloved cat Stella relocated to a family home in Granger, Indiana.
Throughout her thirty-year teaching career at the college level, Allison taught myriad drawing and painting studio courses at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and was a tenured Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art and Design housed in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
For twelve consecutive summers, in tandem with her teaching at UW-Milwaukee, Allison served as the Director and Adjunct Professor for a Study Abroad program at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. While there, she taught drawing and painting classes on location throughout Florence and developed an intensive four-week summer course in Renaissance painting techniques.
Currently, Allison is a full-time artist working from a spacious studio they built in their Indiana home. Allison is represented by eight galleries across the United States. These gallery locations include Florida, Illinois, Georgia, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
Allison has an extensive national exhibition and sales record spanning over three decades. Her work is also found in public and private art collections in Germany, Japan, India, Ireland, and Italy. In 2013, Allison was invited to join an international group of artists in an ongoing collaborative project called The DrawingBox, where she exhibited mixed-media drawings in Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, and the Philippines. To this day, she joins fellow Drawing Box artists to exhibit drawings in both established and alternative venues around the world. In the spring of 2017, Allison's paintings were published with one hundred fellow contemporary artists in a comprehensive new book by Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin called Cold Wax Medium: Techniques, Concepts & Conversations.